It took a little getting used to, me, a New Zealander, marrying an American lady and producing a few offspring with her. She was different, more confident about her ideas and about, well, everything. I didn’t mind at first, I’d been in a rut long enough and with her not being short of a bob or two (mercenary me) I could take things a little easier. We ate pancakes for breakfast, drank lots of coffee and dined out a great deal too. Then I began to feel I was losing my Kiwi independence, she was taking over, and us Kiwi jokers don’t take kindly to American or any take-overs.
I extended my vocabulary to include diapers, cookies, drapes, faucets and skillets to name a few, though I did fight against using them! Then there was something not quite right about her thinking, which is difficult to define exactly what that was but it was there. Grandma put it bluntly: ‘She’s not right in the head, not the full quid. Touched with the Doo Lally stick I reckon.’ Grandma often slipped back into her pre-New Zealand Lancashire days for sayings to confuse the issue. Still, I had to agree, my wife’s doo was definitely lally at some point.
For one thing, her family posted her a regular supply of chewing and bubble gum with a range of colours and flavours both shocking to the eye and nauseating to the stomach. It was deposited in various states of mastication all over the house, garden, car and caravan, and she just didn’t seem to understand how offensive that could be to the rest of us living there. She’d find some that had been lying dormant behind the leg of her chair, she’d look at it for a nano-second then pop it into her mouth to for another week or so. Naughty of me I know, I hadn’t told her our cat, dog and pet hedgehog had sampled, slept against and done other unmentionables to it but she never came to any harm. Not normal, eh?
Vacations were held in the States once every two years, all expenses paid by her mommy. We did the usual round, visiting her relatives which included church breakfast, pot-luck lunches, barbecues, plus participating as part of the studio audience for innumerable TV shows recorded prior to transmission You wouldn’t believe how inane some of those were: two hours or so of drivel, hosted by some grinning look-alike from all the previous shows we’d sat through. The audience applauded every time the host opened his mouth; the host applauded himself being applauded; contestants, the host, the audience and themselves, cue cards were hovering in the background but hardly needed…talk about Pavlov’s dogs.
Then prior to attending the filming of the most recent TV show, we woke up one morning to find that we had been burgled during the night. Yeah, it happens. Still in my pyjamas, I was all for staying behind to clean up the mess but when the wife applied gentle persuasion by way of a half-nelson and threatened to follow that with a high crotch kick, I grabbed a handful of clothes and staggered to the car. She hit the gas and swept us through the traffic with the ease of a racing driver, while I dressed as best I could.
Felling a bit like sheepish with you-know-who leading the way, the kids and myself following, we made our way into the dazzlingly lit entrance to the studio and took our seats in the centre block; more likely to get noticed there my wife reckoned, win a prize maybe.
Wouldn’t you know it, we were surrounded by BO-ers, experts at it; no amount of powder or spray-on deodorant would have masked the fug that lay like a Christchurch winter smog around us. I slipped away and managed to seat myself far to the left and to the rear. That was just before the host, a few moments later, had trotted up to me, grinning to the brim with sickly charm, and dragged me from my seat and onto the stage.
It was the last segment of the show for the BIG prize. In the host’s hand was a piece of paper, and written on that paper was what I had to do to win the prize. Roll of drums, shrieks, screams and applause rolled backwards and forwards. I refrained from doing or showing anything. I just stood there calmly (surely a first for that show) surveying the adolescent scenes around me. The host looked at me, smiled on top of the smile he’d had since he’d dragged down there, then held up his hand for silence. ‘The $75,000 is yours if…’ what he said was lost to me as shrieks, screams and applause burst out.
Again I kept my Kiwi cool, you’d have been proud of me, honest. Smarmy Mr Host held up his hand for silence. I asked him to repeat what he’d said. He applauded. Everyone but me applauded and speaking into the microphone he said, ‘Our guest from Noo Zealand wants me to repeat this statement here!’ He waved the paper, smiling, no doubt thinking: This guy won’t walk away with the station’s $75,000. I mean, who in their right mind would be wearing one green sock and one brown. Come on buster, admit you’re out of luck and get the hell off the stage.
The audience sensed differently perhaps as silence fell around us. Everyone heard the statement this time, and so they saw me raise my trouser legs a little at a time. (This was my first public performance of anything as sexy as this—just quietly—and I rather enjoyed the slightly erotic feeling it induced in me.) I still didn’t applaud when the smarmy charmer handed me the cheque. The audience went wild, some moved forward as if to engulf me, I saw large over-weight arms, female arms waved by wild-eyed ladies with me in their sights; well, more for the $75,000 dollars than for me (I’d learned that much during my vacations in the States).
But didn’t it just restore some equilibrium to our marriage? Too cotton-picking right it did! My wifey seduced me to repeat performances of my trouser leg raising party-piece, at certain times and places; with variations that might very well shock readers of the Karma Sutra. Just the thing for our flagging conjugals. We’re both sleeping much easier at night, our cons have been most jugal ever since, and that must be good news, eh?
Dennis Crompton © 1997
The writings of a Lancashire lad 